It’s officially been a year since YouTube‘s TikTok rival Shorts was rolled out globally.
In July 2021, YouTube expanded Shorts to everywhere that YouTube is currently available. In a letter sent by YouTube’s Global Head of Music Lyor Cohen to the music industry last week, the exec provided a few updates on the progress of the platform over the past 12 months, noting that “Shorts are exploding on YouTube”. Cohen cited a couple of Shorts stats shared by YouTube earlier this year.
Firstly that the platform is now generating 30 billion views per day and that 1.5 billion monthly logged-in users are consuming Shorts content. That 30 billion views per day figure, writes Cohen, is up 400% from one year ago.
Could this be a way to beat a way to beat the algorithm or shadow bans on longform video?
Cohen cites artist success stories on Shorts from the likes of JVKE, Madilyn Bailey, Cooper Alan, and EMELINE, who he says, have grown their subscriber base by 1.4 million, 480,000, 290,000, and 150,000 respectively, “all directly from Shorts”.
According to YouTube, Shorts containing content sampled from long-form videos on the YouTube platform generated over 100 billion views in April alone. Elsewhere in the letter, Cohen said that “everybody knows that our mission at YouTube is to become the No. 1 contributor of revenue for the music industry by 2025”.
Lyor is saying that shorts are the way to lead them in, Shorts to lead to the consumption of long-form content, and thus more immersive fandom.
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